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Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number
2-3, 2008, pp. 191-215 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER
ATLANTIC

Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

Ships were the hving means by which the points within that Atlantic
world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the
shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected. . . .
For all these reasons, the ship is the first of the novel chronotypes
presupposed by my attempts to rethink modernity versus the history
of the black Atlantic.

— Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic

Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the reaches of the
eyes at Guaya when I was a little girl, I knew that there was still
more water. All beginning in water, all ending in water. Turquoise,
aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink blue, navy, blue-black
cerulean water. . . . Water is the first thing in my memory. The sea
sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time. In
the daytime it was indistinguishable to me from air. . . . The same
substance that carried voices or smells, music or emotion.

— Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race,
nationality, sexuality, and gender I want to imagine here. This wateriness is meta-
phor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now called
blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds
of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You see, the black
Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy never told us is
how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate ships, where Europe-

GLQ 14:2-3

DOI 10.1215/10642684-2007-030
© 2008 by Duke University Press

192 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

ans and Africans slept with fellow — and I mean same-sex — sailors. And, more
powerfully and silently, how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave
ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began
to learn this black Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in
Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word Creole
women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is "my girl," but literally it
means mate, as in shipmate — she who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sed-
imented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage,
as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive
African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds,
and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted
the commodification of their bought and sold bodies hy feeling smA feeling for their
co-occupants on these ships.

I evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the
black queer Atlantic. The ocean obscures all origins, and neither ship nor Atlantic
can be a place of origin. Not of blackness, though perhaps Africans first became
negros and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though per-
haps some Africans were first intimate with same-sex shipmates then. Instead, in
relationship to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic is the site
of what the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls "crosscurrents."

Oceans and seas are important sites for differently situated people. Indig-
enous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists, workers, and ath-
letes. Oceans and seas are sites of inequality and exploitation — resource
extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic testing, and genocide. At the
same time, oceans and seas are sites of beauty and pleasure — solitude,
sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and maritime realms are
also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous
trajectories of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual
formations.!

Conceptualizing the complex possibilities and power dynamics of the maritime,
Fajardo posits the necessity of thinking through transoceanic crosscurrents. These
are theoretical and ethnographic borderlands at sea, where elements or currents
of historical, conceptual, and embodied maritime experience come together to
transform racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves. The queer black
Atlantic I discuss here navigates these crosscurrents as it brings together enslaved
and African, brutality and desire, genocide and resistance. Here, fluidity is not an

BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC

193

easy metaphor for queer and racially hybrid identities but for concrete, painful,
and liberatory experience. It is the kind of queer of color space that Roderick Fer-
guson calls for in Aberrations in Black, one that reflects the materiality of black
queer experience while refusing its transparency. ^

If the black queer Atlantic brings together such long-flowing history, why
is black queer studies situated as a dazzlingly new "discovery" in academia — a
hybrid, mermaidlike imagination that has yet to find its land legs? In the last five
years, black queer and queer of color critiques have navigated innovative direc-
tions in African diaspora studies as scholars like Ferguson and E. Patrick Johnson
push the discipline to map intersections between racialized and sexualized bod-
ies. Unfortunately, Eurocentric queer theorists and heterocentric race theorists
have engaged their discourses of resistant black queerness as a new fashion —
a glitzy, postmodern invention borrowed and adapted from Euro-American queer
theory. In contrast, as interventions like the New-York Historical Society's exhibit
Slavery in New York demonstrate, the Middle Passage and slave experience con-
tinue to be evoked as authentic originary sites of African diaspora identities and
discourses.-' This stark split between the "newest" and "oldest" sites of blackness
reflects larger political trends that polarize queer versus diasporic and immigrant
issues by moralizing and domesticating sexuality as an undermining of tradition,
on the one hand, while racializing and publicizing global southern diasporas as
threats to the integrity of a nation of (fictively) European immigrants, on the other.
My discussion here proposes to intervene in this polarization by bridging imagina-
tions of the "choice" of black queerness and the forced migration of the Middle
Passage. What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to take
seriously the possibility that, as forcefully as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow
together, so too do the turbulent fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new
geography — or as Fajardo proposes, oceanography — of sexual, gendered, trans-
national, and racial identities might emerge through reading for black queer his-
tory and theory in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle Passage?*

In what follows, I explore such queer black Atlantic oceanographies by
comparing two narrative spaces. One is a site where an imagination of this Atlan-
tic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing, specifically in water metaphors
of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is a site where such imagina-
tions emerge through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana-
Maurine Lara's tale of queer migration in Erzidie's Skirt (2006) and Dionne Brand's
reflections on the Middle Passage in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). I
turn to these literary texts as a queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive
of the black Atlantic.^ And the literary texts turn to ocean waters themselves as

194 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

an archive, an ever-present, ever-reformulating record of the unimaginable. Lara
and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physi-
cal remnants, dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage, and they plumb it
metaphorically, as opaque space to convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing
and flowing histories of violence and healing in the African diaspora. "Water over-
flows with memory," writes M. Jacqui Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage
in Pedagogies of Crossing. "Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory."^
Developing a black feminist epistemology to uncover submerged histories —
particularly those stories of Africans' forced ocean crossings that traditional his-
toriography cannot validate — Alexander eloquently argues that searchers must
explore outside narrow conceptions of the "factual" to get there. Such explorations
would involve muddying divisions between documented and intuited, material and
metaphoric, past and present so that "who is remembered — and how — is contin-
ually being transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . . collapsing, ulti-
mately, the demarcation of the prescriptive past, present, and future of linear time."*^
While Alexander searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic ceremony, Lara
and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary
spaces through the literal and figurative passages of their historical fictions. The
subaltern can speak in submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwa-
ter voice, whispering (as Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at once wash closer
and remain opaque, resisting closure.

I, and my lesbian sisters and gay brothers . . . are not a new
fashion. . . . We return to the sea and the shores and once upon a
time, which transposes into this time, which it always was. . . . the
past simultaneously forever embedded in the present, in the pain and
inevitable horrors confronted by conscientious unblinking memory,
in the tragedies and occasional triumphs of history always raveled by
so much needless suffering, by the unbearable human misery that
we must not, for our collective sakes and the continued growth of this
body we call "humanity," ever be denied.
— Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent

In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in scholarly
images of the global south, smashing and wearing away essentialist conceptions of
race and nationality with the insistent pounding force of ocean waters. Rigorously
theorizing identities that have always already been in flux and rethinking black
"insularity" from England and Manhattan to Martinique and Cuba, imaginative

BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC

195

captains of Atlantic and Caribbean studies have called prominently on oceanic
metaphors. Their conceptual geographies figure oceans and seas as a presence
that is history, a history that is present. In the watershed The Black Atlantic, Gil-
roy evokes the Atlantic as the trope through which he imagines the emergence of
black modernities. A past of Atlantic crossings underpins his engagement with
contemporary multiracial Britain, where the black in the Union Jack is no novelty
introduced by recent immigrants but a continuation of centuries of transoceanic
interchanges. Calling on the ship as the first image of this black Atlantic, Gilroy
begins by stipulating that ships and oceans are not merely abstract figures but
"cultural and political units" that "refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-
remembered micro politics of the slave trade."^ He underscores that seminal Afri-
can diaspora figures like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Robert Wedder-
burn, and Crispus Attucks worked with and as sailors (why omit Harriet Jacobs,
Mary Seacole, and other sailing women?), and notes that the physical mobility
enabled by the ocean was fundamental to their intellectual motility. Yet while many
of these masculine sailor-intellectuals resurface in Gilroy 's later discussions, the
history of their sea voyages does not. Both ships and the Atlantic itself — as con-
crete maritime space rather than conceptual principle for remapping blackness —
drop out of his text immediately after this paragraph. Neither the Middle Passage
nor the Atlantic appear in the index, remaining phantom metaphors rather than
concrete historical presences. Gilroy 's ghost ships and dark waters traverse five
memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.

In the equally influential The Repeating Island, Antonio Benitez-Rojo
navigates contemporary Caribbean identity through a postmodern theorization of
the sea as the ultimate space of diffusion, a watery body whose history continually
splashes into the present. The "geographic accident" of the Antilles — situated
where Atlantic meets Caribbean and migrants from Africa, Europe, Asia, and
the Americas cross and converge — beats out the rhythm of repeating histories,
repeating islands. Mining the metaphoric possibilities of the sea, Bemtez-Rojo
finds that it

gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the character of an
archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction (of what?): unstable con-
densations, turbulences, whirlpools, claps of bubbles, frayed seaweed,
sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, down-
pours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages
of signification.''

}96 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Ocean and sea remain at once insistently present and insistently abstracted as
he flourishingly, intriguingly bypasses "real" migrant trajectories to chart figura-
tive marine confluences, alternative trajectories of globalization that pass through
Caribbean history to connect "the Niger with the Mississippi, the China Sea with
the Orinoco, the Parthenon with a fried food stand in an alley in Paramaribo."
Spiraling maps where the pre-, trans-, and postnational intersect, Benftez-Rojo's
voyages are shipless crossings where "the peoples of the sea, or better, the Peo-
ples of the Sea proliferate incessantly while differentiating themselves from one
another, traveling together toward the infinite."

Appearing and disappearing as briefly as the ship, sexuality also surfaces
in Gilroy's concluding discussion of music in the black Atlantic. But here again,
sexuality (like seafaring) is not so much an embodied experience as a metaphor.
Sex, it turns out, is almost as omnipresent in black Atlantic storytelling as salt
water on an island. Initially, Gilroy places narratives of sexuality in competition
with histories of race, as he notes that "conflictual representation of sexuality has
vied with the discourse of racial emancipation to constitute the inner core of black
expressive cultures."ii But later, tension between these two melts away as Gilroy
concludes that, actually, talking about sex is another way to talk about race. Black
love stories in popular songs and elsewhere, he writes, are "narratives of love and
loss [that] transcode other forms of yearning and mourning associated with histo-
ries of dispersal and exile." Sex is not about sex, then; it is about pain. While the
Atlantic — rather than remain primarily a site of diasporic trauma — is optimisti-
cally metaphorized as space that expands the horizons of black consciousness, sex
is pessimistically metaphorized as a sorrow song that never yields deep pleasure.
Gilroy's black Atlantic seems equally resistant to victimizing and sexualizing its
mariners, as if both impulses were too much part of colonial discourse to warrant
sustained attention.

If Gilroy's Atlantic is frigid, Benftez-Rojo's Caribbean overflows with
hyperfeeling female sexuality. Recentering the resistantly nonphallic Peoples of
the Sea, Benftez-Rojo foregrounds a vaginalized Caribbean as he proclaims:

The Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe,
in its mercantilist laboratory, conceived of the project of inseminating the
Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa; the Atlantic is today the Atlan-
tic .. . because it is the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose
vagina was stretched between continental clamps. . . . After the blood
and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic
tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the
forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.i'^

BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC

197

Here sexual violence and painful reproduction are simultaneously abstracted and
reinscribed in regional imaginations; projected onto the water by which Caribbean
women arrived in the archipelago, they conceive a disturbing image that spreads
women's metaphoric legs in unsettling ways. Yet the suppurating wound can heal,
almost magically. A few pages later, the vaginal sea opens into a metaphor for lib-
eratory pleasure and pleasurable liberation as Benftez-Rojo imagines the region's
femininity as "its flux, its diffuse sensuality, its generative force, its capacity to
nourish and conserve (juices, spring, pollen, rain, seed, shoot, ritual sacrifice)."^*
Bleeding, orgasming, or both, Benftez-Rojo's cunnic Caribbean overexposes the
sexualized bodies that Gilroy denies. Like the sea, the space between women's
legs is at once insistently present and insistently ethereal; like the sea, the space
between women's legs becomes a metaphor to mine.

These tropes of the black Atlantic, of Peoples of the Sea, do call to me as
powerful enunciations of crosscurrents of African diaspora identity, and I evoke
them in respect and solidarity. And yet as Gilroy, Benftez-Rojo, Edouard Glis-
sant, and others call on maritime metaphors without maritime histories and evoke
sexualized bodies as figures rather than experiences, their writing out of material-
ity stops short of the most radical potential of such oceanic imaginations. i'' There
are other Atlantic and Caribbean histories that these scholars could have evoked
to make sense of the present, other material details of maritime crossings they
could have drawn on to make their metaphors richer conceptual tools. As Africans
became diasporic, Atlantic and Caribbean, sex and sexuality did not only impact
imaginations; they impacted bodies. Not at all an opening to infinite possibilities,
the sea was initially a site of painful fluidities for many Africans. The first sight
of the ocean was often a vision of fear, as Equiano remembers when slave traders
marched him to the coast:

I was beyond measure astonished at this, as I had never before seen any
water larger than a pond or a rivulet, and my surprise was mingled with no
small fear. . . . The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the
coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and
waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon
converted to terror,

Once loaded onto the slave ships, Africans became fluid bodies under the force
of brutality. Tightly or loosely packed in sex-segregated holds — men chained
together at the ankles while women were sometimes left unchained — surrounded
by churning, unseen waters, these brutalized bodies themselves became liquid,
oozing. Ship's surgeon Alexander Falconbridge records days when "wet and blow-

}98 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

ing weather having occasioned the portholes to be shut and the grating to be cov-
ered, fluxes and fevers among the negroes ensued. . . . The deck was so covered
with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of
the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse."^'^ Lara adds to this imagination in
a character's vision of a slave ship: "Women's menstrual blood stained the floor
around her, pus crusting at the edges of the chattel wounds. . . . She could feel
her body rise in a wave of urine and blood, the stench so wretched as to make her
choke on her own breath."!** On this Atlantic, then, black body waters, corporeal
effluvia, and the stains of gendered and reproductive bodies were among the first
sites of colonization.

But this bloody Atlantic was also the site of collaboration and resistance.
In the early eighteenth century, ship captains like John Newton and James Barbot
repeatedly record with horror how despite such conditions slaves conspired to
rebel against captors. At the same time, unnamed rebellions took place not in
violent but in erotic resistance, in interpersonal relationships enslaved Africans
formed with those imprisoned and oozing beside them. Sally and Richard Price's
research on Saramacca maroons documents mati as "a highly charged volitional
relationship . . . that dates back to the Middle Passage — matis were originally
'shipmates,' those who had survived the journey out from Africa together . . . those
who had experienced the trauma of enslavement and transport together."!' Colo-
nial chronicles suggest that shipmate relationships were prominent in other parts
of the Caribbean as well. Mederic Moreau de Saint-Mery reports matt-like part-
nerships between enslaved women in prerevolutionary Haiti in his Description . . .
de lisle Saint Domingue (1797), and in The History ■ ■ ■ of the British West- Indies
(1794) Bryan Edwards remarks: "This is a striking circumstance; the term ship-
mate is understood among [West Indian slaves] as signifying a relationship of the
most endearing nature; perhaps as recalling the time when the sufferers were cut
off together from their common country and kindred, and awakening reciprocal
sympathy from the remembrance of mutual affliction.''^" Expanding these observa-
tions, the anthropologist Gloria Wekker notes the significance of bonds between
shipmates throughout the Afro-Atlantic:

In different parts of the Diaspora the relationship between people who
came over to the "New" World on the same ship remained a peculiarity of
this experience. The Brazilian "malungo," the Trinidadian "malongue,"
the Haitian "batiment" and the Surinamese "sippi" and "mati" are all
examples of this special, non-biological bond between two people of the
same sex. 21

BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC

199

As fragmentarily recorded here, the emergence of intense shipmate relationships
in the water-rocked, no-person's-land of slave holds created a black Atlantic same-
sex eroticism: a feeling of, feeling for the kidnapped that asserted the sentience of
the bodies that slavers attempted to transform into brute matter.

This Atlantic and these erotic relationships are neither metaphors nor
sources of disempowerment. Instead, they are one way that fluid black bodies
refused to accept that the liquidation of their social selves — the colonization of
oceanic and body waters — meant the liquidation of their sentient selves. Some
mati and malungo were probably sexual connections, others not. Yet regardless
of whether intimate sexual contact took place between enslaved Africans in the
Atlantic or after landing, relationships between shipmates read as queer relation-
ships. Queer not in the sense of a "gay" or same-sex loving identity waiting to be
excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer in the sense of
marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connect-
ing in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind
when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections
that counteract imperial desires for Africans' living deaths. Reading for shipmates
does not offer to clarify, to tell a documentable story of Atlantic, Caribbean, immi-
grant, or "gay" pasts. Instead it disrupts provocatively. Fomented in Atlantic cross-
currents, black queerness itself becomes a crosscurrent through which to view
hybrid, resistant subjectivities — opaquely, not transparently. Perhaps, as Brand
writes, black queers really have no ancestry except the black water.22 But diving
into this water stands to transform African diaspora scholarship in ways as sur-
prising as Equiano's first glimpse of the sea.

Lara's debut novel, Erzulie's Skirt, collects gear to take this dive. Like
Gilroy and Benftez-Rojo, Lara imagines how the history of the Middle Passage
overflows into Atlantic and Caribbean presents; like Edwards or Moreau de St.
Mery, she traces a self-consciously fragmented history of the relationships forged
in diaspora's cauldrons. But she does so with a difference, queerly. The novel nar-
rates the travels of two women lovers, Haitian Miriam and Dominican Micaela,
who meet in Santo Domingo and disastrously attempt to immigrate to Puerto Rico
on a yola crossing the Mona Strait. Water that defies abstract, passively feminized
figuration, the shark-infested Mona passage is an active seismic area rocked by
enormous waves that tens of thousands of immigrants confront each year in small
wooden boats. Dominican maritime migration to Puerto Rico fosters ever-growing
informal businesses, headed by organizers and captains who overcrowd fishing
boat -sized crafts with hundreds of people desperate for economic opportunities
in the global northern territory across the strait. Ten thousand Dominicans arrive

200 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

in Puerto Rico by yola each year; many others die in the process. Because of
the earthquake-rocked roughness of the waters and the tight packing of boats,
migrants routinely perish when yolas capsize, passengers are thrown out to lighten
loads, or unexpectedly long trips lead to dehydration or starvation. 2^ For Lara
these hellish conditions constitute a contemporary Middle Passage whose stories
are drowned out, and her novel's inspiration arises from this. "My own connec-
tion to this story — it's deep and personal," she states in an interview with Naomi
Wood. "Slavery and the trafficking of people . . . are still very real circumstances
for many Dominicans today. ... I did not make the journey across the water from
the D.R. to Puerto Rico. I know many people who have tried — and never made it.
Or were turned back."24

Never evaporating metaphors, turbulent marine waters are an overwhelm-
ing physical presence in her novel. They spill into the yola and threaten to sink it;
bluely reflect the sun's glare until heat almost drives raftgoers mad; crust thirsty,
cracked lips with salt; instantly swallow those who fall overboard; and make terri-
fied passengers urinate on themselves at the sight of bodies sinking. As it describes
this dangerous passage, Erzulie's Skirt navigates an oceanic crosscurrent: the
Mona Strait is where the Atlantic and Caribbean come violently together. The
raft crossing also opens a temporal crosscurrent: Lara thematizes the repeating
history of the Middle Passage through ancestral memories of transit from Africa
that surface in Micaela's yo/aboard dreams. As they survive rafts, plantations, and
coerced sex work together, Miriam and Micaela become not only lovers but literal
and figurative shipmates. "How I have loved this woman," Miriam thinks to herself
near the end of the novel. "This woman who has helped me through the darkest
hours. . . . The tenderness between them had helped them survive their slavery."25
This survival of twentieth-century captivity is framed and given meaning by its
connection to a history of transoceanic slavers. Lara imagines the choppy surface
of the Mona Strait as a window through which the "other side of the water" — the
liminal space where ancestors and spirits reside in Vodoun cosmology — touches
the realm of the living, mirroring the protagonists' journey from the bottom of the
ocean and through the lens of Micaela's psychic visions.

As Miriam and Micaela wait to board the yola in Santo Domingo, the sea
before them is the kind of memory Alexander imagines: frightening and promis-
ing, past and future, physical and psychic. The water speaks to Micaela:

Micaela looked out at the ocean, at the churning waters at her feet, closing
her eyes to the cool night air. La Mar had always been there. She knew
from dreams that it was from there that she had arisen. That sometime

BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC

201

long ago she had entered her waters and emerged on this side, whole and
broken. That somewhere in her depths was the key to her death and to her
living. As Micaela prayed. La Mar appeared before her dressed in silver
and jewels and the rosy shells of Iambi. She lit up the sky so that even the
moon hid behind Her brilliance. She came and She sang to Micaela about
everything: the metros, the veves, the children, the hunger of suffering, the
distance between her land and her destiny. She pulled Micaela from the
hungry depths of exhaustion and gave her food, sweet water and love. Her
sweet voice sang through the waves:

Hubo un lugar donde los dos desaparecieron

Donde susurraban los secretos de su deseo

Se miraban a traves de la oscuridad

Se admiraban y en silencio se decian:

Amor te quiero

Sabes que te deseo

Amor nos iremos de aqui un dfa

La pesadilla que nos ata desaparecera

La Mar told her of a place where two people lay with irons on their ankles.
They gazed at each other across the darkness, despite the darkness, and
their eyes shone like the stars. In the unending blackness that covered
them, that suffocated them, they spoke: "Amor, I long for your kisses, your
arms around me, along my hips. Amor, I love you." All this they whis-
pered without moving their lips, in languages that escaped the trappings
of sound. 26

La Mar is the black Atlantic in iridescent Iambi (conch), embodied and
queer. This figure that eclipses moon and stars and brings women sweet water and
love is the novel's most eroticized character — a material body who whispers in
Micaela's ear, whose waters she enters, whose depths she longs to explore, whose
sexuality is neither overexposed nor hidden. I see her as an image of the queer
black Atlantic not primarily because she arouses the sensuality of another femi-
nine character, though, nor even because her appearance to Micaela performs a
femme desire that needs no masculinist gaze (a la Benftez-Rojo) to validate its
apparition. Instead La Mar's queerness churns silverly in her overflow, in the sea-
like capacity to desire beyond the brutality of history, nationality, enslavement,
and immigration that she models for drowned shipmates and endangered yola-
mates. Neither disembodied metaphor nor oozing wound, her fluid desire becomes

202

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

a resistant, creative praxis that, as Brand describes diasporic art, experiments
with being "celebratory, even with the horrible," flowing together unexpected
erotic linkages even, especially, in spaces of global violence and inequity.^' No
matter what devastation she traverses La Mar keeps desiring, and this is the queer
feeling that metaphorically and materially connects her to African diaspora immi-
grants past and present.

La Mar as she appears here is not only a mirror for black Atlantic queer-
ness; she is a black Atlantic that mirrors queerly. Her song creates figures of
comparison where terms are not equated but rather diffracted and recomposed,
reflected in a broken mirror whose fractures are part of their meaning-creation.
Let me point to two examples of "mis-mirrored" terms in this passage: languages
(Spanish/English) and couples (yo/abound/shipwrecked). In the second paragraph
a centered, italicized Spanish-language poem — whose distinct visual arrange-
ment recalls the veves, (figures drawn on the ground in Voudoun ceremonies) that
La Mar sings of — interrupts standard English prose; although the next paragraph
offers an indirect, still bilingual translation ("Amor, I long for your kisses"), this
translation remains notably inexact. Amplifying this chain of repetition with dif-
ference, the words of the poem are then revealed to be "really" spoken in the
drowned slaves' unrepresentable "languages that escaped the trappings of sound":
instead of speaking two languages that mirror each other. La Mar's song contains
three intertwined yet unequatable lenguas, proliferating and connecting across
difference with each translation. Similarly, the star-eyed lovers at the bottom of the
sea — those thrown overboard during the Middle Passage without their presence
being definitively liquidated — do "twin" sea-crossing lovers Miriam and Micaela,
but also do not. Miriam and Micaela remain on the waters' surface while the iron-
clad lovers remain submerged and the love of the former helps them stay afloat
while the amor of the latter comforts them in their sinking. The present repeats
the past with a difference, and the spectacular figure of La Mar that joins them
appears as the surplus — the overflow, the temporal and cultural gap that cannot
be dissolved by their connection.

La Mar whispers this in our ears, too: in queer diasporic imagining, the
gap — the material difference — always matters and must be part of any figuration
that makes meaningful connection possible. The maritime metaphors of Gilroy
and Benftez-Rojo move toward a kind of closure, the Atlantic transmuting into a
horizon of hybridity and the cunnic Caribbean healing orgasmically in order to
become the vehicles these authors desire for diasporic and regional identities. Yet
such closure is made possible only by washing over important materialities and
multiplicities in visions of diaspora and region. La Mar's unclosable, untranslat-

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able language of beauty and pain churns differently, crossing instead in turbulent,
excessive currents of diffracting meanings. As Micaela floats literally suspended
in water between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, La Mar's queer mir-
roring provides a medium for conceiving what it means for diasporic Africans to
emerge from her waters "whole and broken": brutalized and feeling, connected to
the past and separate from it, divided from other diasporic migrants and linked
to them. To think the black queer Atlantic, not only must its metaphors be mate-
rially informed; they must be internally discontinuous, allowing for differences
and inequalities between situated subjects that are always already part of both
diaspora and queerness. They must creatively figure what Rinaldo Walcott imag-
ines as "a rethinking of community that might allow for different ways of coher-
ing into some form of recognizable political entity . . . [where] we must confront
singularities without the willed effort to make them cohere into oneness; we must
struggle to make a community of singularities."^^ The black Atlantic is not just
any ocean, and what is queer about its fluid amor is that it is always churning,
always different even from itself.

And larger and larger and ever larger than me, 0 sea: water: waves
and foam. . . . How the sea would take I and wrap I deep in it. How
it would drown I, mash I up, wash I into bits. . . . And so I does say
now that I know the sea this same sea like I does know the back of me
hand, says I: these currents, these waves, these foams. . . . Let this
sea not take I, but let it talk to I. Let it sing. The sea, the sea. Yes,
water. Waves. Wetness, poundsurf, that I does love.
— Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now

And in the last fifteen years queer theory has harnessed the repetitive, unpre-
dictable energy of currents, waves, and foam to smash and wash into bits many
I's — from the gendered self to the sexed body, from heterocentric feminist speech
to homonormative gay discourse. In this field where groundlessness is celebrated,
writers also explicitly or implicitly rely on metaphors of fluidity, which provide
an undercurrent for expanding formulations of gender and sexual mobility. Judith
Butler's praise of the resistant power of drag's fluid genders and sexualities in
the pivotal Gender Trouble is echoed by many a queer theoretical text: "Perpet-
ual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to
resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic
culture and its critics of the right to claim naturalized or essentialist gender iden-
tities."25 This proliferation multiplies the genders and sexualities explored by

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queer theory beyond women and men, gay and straight. They soon include, as Eve
Sedgwick puts it, "pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leather
folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bull-
daggers, divas. Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties,
wannabes."'"^ No deviant is a desert isle here, but part of an archipelago rushed
together by a common sea of queerness.

Does this queer sea have a color, though? As the cascading, un-color-coded
sentences of Butler and Sedgwick suggest, in the early 1990s prominent queer the-
orists denaturalized conventional gender and sexuality while renaturalizing global
northernness and unmarked whiteness, initially unreferenced as if they were as
neutral as fresh water. In both theorists' early genderscapes, the bodies and selves
rendered fluid are first and foremost gendered and sexualized, only faintly marked
by other locations — only secondarily racialized, nationalized, classed. When
Butler acknowledges that codes of (presumably white) racial purity undergird the
gender norms disturbed in her initial consideration of "fluidity of identities," she
does so belatedly and between parentheses (as part of a long list of clarifications
to her discussion of drag in the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble).^^ Sedgwick's
list, somewhat differently, momentarily parts the waves of queer theory's uncom-
mented whiteness as race fades in subtly with the African American— associated
terms bulldagger and Snap! queen. Not only is this faint racialization limited to
the black-white landscape of the contemporary global north, keeping terms like
mahu, mati, tomboy, tongzhi unlistable, but the particularities of this possible
racialization remain as unspecified as the color of the leather favored by "leather
folk" or the jacket cut of the "ladies in tuxedoes." The list's sheer heterogeneity
sweeps the bulldagger's racial particularities into the same washing currents as
the butch bottom's sexual particularities.

These queer theorists are innovative, rigorous scholars whose work
focuses on a predominantly white global north but who do — often in introduc-
tions— acknowledge how racialization intersects the construction and deconstruc-
tion of ossified genders and sexualities. Shortly after her list in Tendencies'' intro-
duction, Sedgwick contends that "a lot of the most exciting recent work around
'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under
gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial national-
ity criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing dis-
courses."'''^ This is not her work in a text that goes on to deftly engage Jane Aus-
ten and Sigmund Freud, but she does gesture toward the importance of "other"
scholars taking it up. Similarly, in the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of
Gender Trouble, Butler remarks that "racial presumptions invariably underwrite

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the discourse on gender in ways that need to be made explicit" and concedes that
if she rewrote the book she would include a discussion of racialized sexuality. In
thinking through performativity and race, she suggests that "the question to ask
is not whether the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what
happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race."-^'* But of course
there is not just one question to ask of the meeting point between Butler's theory
and race, and those I would pose would be different still. Namely, what happens
when queer theories start with explicit formulations of racialized sexuality and
sexualized race, rather than add them in after theories like performativity have
already been elaborated? How does this change in point of departure change the
tidal pattern of queer theory? How might it shift the field's dominant metaphors,
decentering performativity 's stages and unearthing other topoi?

"Metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into
concepts," Butler aptly remarks in this preface. And in a rare autobiographical
moment, the short text offers one image of literal liquidity that informs the meta-
phoric fluidity (threatening to congeal into a concept) in this foundational text of
queer theory. Just after her discussion of performativity, Butler provides an insight
into the literal starting place for Gender Trouble. Explaining how her involvement
in lesbian and gay politics on the East Coast of the United States informed her
writing of this academic text, she recounts: "At the same time that I was ensconced
in the academy, I was also living a life outside those walls, and though Gender
Trouble is an academic book, it began, for me, with a crossing-over, sitting on
Rehoboth Beach, wondering whether I could link the different sides of my life."-'*
Meaning "place for all," Rehoboth is an Atlantic resort town that boasts beauti-
ful, Caribbean— bright white sand beaches and has become one of the Northeast's
premier gay and lesbian summer getaways. As Butler suggests, it is situated at a
crosscurrent: "Water, water everywhere. . . . Bounded on the east by the mighty
Atlantic Ocean, and on the west by Rehoboth Bay and Indian River Bay," gushes
a promotional Web site.-*'' This crosscurrent has a black Atlantic history, from
the eighteenth-century docking of slave ships in Delaware's harbors to a maritime
version of the underground railroad that passed through the state's waters in the
nineteenth century. But by the late twentieth century that history had been largely
washed out of sight. Over 98 percent of the city's population is now white and,
as Alexs Pate's West of Rehoboth depicts, people of color remain semi-invisible,
concentrated in segregated neighborhoods. •''s So when Butler sits at the "crossing-
over" of Rehoboth Beach, the difference that prominently marked its shores would
be that of sexuality — the beach-combing gay and lesbian tourists who make the
resort what it is, a site of play and mobility for sexual rather than racial "others."

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Now, if this is where one of queer theory's most influential texts emerged
and a site that (Butler suggests) has metaphoric valences, I want to extend that
metaphor by saying: frequently, prominent queer theorists continue to work from
Rehoboth Beach. This is an important place from which to work, certainly, a site
steeped in possibilities for meaningful confluences between thinking sexuality
and thinking race. But theorists have a tendency to wait (figuratively) for queers of
color to arrive on Rehoboth's shores in the hopes that they will join the sexuality-
centered signifying games already set up ... in the hopes they will take up
theories of performativity and rework them through race, for example. And they
wait rather than seriously engage how some of queer theory's fundamental prem-
ises— including its emphasis on abstract rather than concrete crossings-over, its
references to places like Rehoboth without engagement with their geographic and
cultural specificity — need to change in order to make possible deeply productive
meetings between sexuality and race. That is, they welcome the appearance of
queer of color scholarship without rigorously confronting the exclusionary prac-
tices that marginalize queer global southern experiences. To become an expan-
sively decolonizing practice, queer theory must adjust its vision to see what has
been submerged in the process of unmarking whiteness and global northernness:
the black Atlantic, New England Bay, and Indian River of queer crossings-over,
the intersecting beach topoi of slavery and liberation, coerced work and unconven-
tional play, unmarked whiteness and invisible blackness, flesh exposed for vaca-
tion and for auction. Rehoboth's layered present and past exemplifies the need to
engage specific, situated histories and the difference they make. Water is only
literally transparent, and the imagination of fluidity inspired by the Rehoboth or
the San Francisco bays may not be the same as that inspired by the southern
Atlantic or the eastern Caribbean. Nor may its metaphorics be as playful as waves
of punk bands, snap! queens, butch bottoms. . . . Just as travel does not offer
the same image of freedom to the gay undocumented immigrant that it does to
the queer cosmopolitan, conceptualizations of the fluid change when we approach
islands where the sea simultaneously carries the violent history of the Middle Pas-
sage, a present of yolas and tourist cruises, and a possible future of interisland
connections.

Also composed at the turn of the century. Brand's Map to the Door of No
Return charts space to explore these complexities. The thirty-year literary career
of this Trinidadian-born, Toronto-resident poet, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and
activist narrates continual migration among Atlantic and Caribbean seascapes,
crossings-over that connect sites like Delaware's Rehoboth or Toronto's Bathurst to
Cuba's Santiago and Trinidad's Blanchisseuse. The chief landing points of her work

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207

transmigrate between Grenada, then Trinidad, now Ontario. Brand's writing in the
1980s is propelled, haunted by her vision of the Grenadan shore stormed by U.S.
troops in 1983, walking distance from the office where she worked as an informa-
tion officer for the People's Development Agency under the New Jewel government.
Her work returns again and again to waters that absorbed the bloodshed of this
invasion, combing Caribbean beaches to attempt to put many sides of her political
life together: tidal scenes of revolutionary hope, invasion, betrayal, death, eroti-
cism, and possibility. These last wash in prominently when, in 1990 — the same
year that Gender Trouble and Sedgwick's Episternology of the Closet revolutionized
sexuality studies — Brand publishes No Language Is Neutral. This award-winning
collection of poems is heralded by Michelle Cliff as the first anglophone Caribbean
text to explore fully love between women in a West Indian setting, the black queer
Atlantic of Trinidad's north coast. ' But, resistant to being caught in the nostalgia
of a return to her native land, by the late 1990s Brand's geographic and thematic
focus moves yet again to the shores of Lake Ontario, where she now lives in the
sea of West Indian and other diasporics that has become Toronto. This northern
migration further complicates the crossed currents she witnesses, as the Canada
cycle reflects gathering discomfort with writing from any identity — whether revo-
lutionary, activist, black, lesbian, or otherwise. As she explains in an interview,
"The book is a map . . . [to] a new kind of identity and existence" that challenges
isolated, nationally or otherwise bounded constructions of racial, ethnic, gender,
and sexual identity. Its trajectory answers her post-Grenada, post-homeland ques-
tion: "So now, who am I? I really want to think about that. My objections lie with
the people who hang onto what they call identities for the most awful reasons, and
those are the reasons of exclusion. I'm trying to be very careful how I say it. I don't
want to say that we don't have a history, but what we hold onto has to be part of a
much larger terrain."''^

As it explores this terrain, her Map does not emerge as a text as immedi-
ately given to queer reading as either Gender Trouble or No Language Is Neutral.
Yet its oceanography queers many crossings-over, and indeed Brand once gener-
ously thanked me for reading "that book that way."-''' Instead of foregrounding
fluxes of gender or sexuality this work rushes into larger bodies, larger openings.
The text is a tactile, shifting oceanography of African diaspora experience imag-
ined at an unremitting intersection between maritime materialities and metaphors.
This intersection is physically dominated by the Atlantic Ocean and the Carib-
bean Sea, those waters from which blacks emerge whole and broken, and psychi-
cally dominated by the Door of No Return, the "real, imaginary, and imagined"
portal through which Africans left the continent in slave ships' holds."*" Brand's

208 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Map through the "sea in between" is fluidly genred writing that moves between
childhood memories and family stories, ships' logs and colonial maritime chroni-
cles, and contemporary echoes of the slave trade in the conflux of immigrants from
the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Africa that form their own human
sea in Toronto. *i Its creative project is one Brand identifies as always underway
in diaspora: to record disruptions that continue on the other side of the door and
"reclaim the black body from that domesticated, captive, open space" it has
become.*^ This project is fundamentally queer, in a black Atlantic, crosscurrents
way. Rather than eroticize individual bodies, it offers what Chela Sandoval calls
a "social erotics": a compass that traces historical linkages that were never sup-
posed to be visible, remembers connections that counteract imperial desires for
global southern disaggregation, and puts together the fragmented experiences of
those whose lives, as Butler writes, were never supposed to "qualify as the 'human'
and the 'livable.'"*-'

Like the texts of Butler and Sedgwick, Brand's work also generates lists
that crash onto her pages like waves — but join unexpected terms in concatena-
tions that recall the chains of slave ships more than those of sexual play. Toward
the end of her Map, Brand imagines the continued haunting of the black Atlan-
tic by those literally and figuratively drowned in the Middle Passage, those she
calls the marooned of the diaspora. For these marooned she writes a ruttier: which
is, she explains, "a long poem containing navigational instructions which sailors
learned by heart . . . the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and fla-
vour of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one's way at sea."**
Reconfiguring these colonial maritime lists, her ruttier traces how misdirections
become the way for diasporic Africans — always painfully, always partially. She
describes the marooned as unsexed, irreducibly opaque figures who at once refuse
to stay submerged and refuse to appear in clearly recognizable bodies. Like many
ghosts, their bodies seemed waterlogged, distorted beyond naturalizable gender
and other identities:

Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is, wandered,
wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut the door,
derelict, relinquished, apart. . . . And it doesn't matter where in the world,
this spirit is no citizen, is no national, no one who is christened, no sex,
this spirit is washed of all this lading, bag and baggage, jhaji bundle, geor-
gie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel, and only holds its own weight
which is nothing, which is memoryless and tough with remembrances,
heavy with lightness, aching with grins.*''

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209

"This spirit ... is no sex"; this spirit is a singular, plural, and genderless they
that "was, is," in a grammatical unmarking that parallels the absence of gender in
Creole third-person pronouns. This genderlessness is perhaps an ocean reflection
of the negative equality of sexes experienced in plantation labor that brutalized
men and women without discrimination — a gender queerness that calls into ques-
tion facile linkages between gender trouble and liberation.

But more than this, the fluid identities of Brand's black queer Atlantic
simultaneously efface gender and nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, their
maroons "no citizen, no national, no one christened, no sex." This is a lyric litany
of negatives whose rhythmic, sonoric, and conceptual linkages speak a cross-
current of dissolved and reconfigured black selfhoods ... a tide where woman-
hood, economic status, motherhood, Yorubaness, (for example) are all disrupted
from previous significations at the same time — black queer time. This kind of
ongoing, multiple black Atlantic resignification is thematized and performed
through these lists where words jostle against each other unexpectedly, break-
ing open and reconfiguring meanings. The conventional baggage of language is
shuffled and shed as the spirit is washed of "bag and baggage, jhaji bundle, geor-
gie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel." At the end of this washing, maroons'
sexless and otherwise unmarked bodies emerge as the legacy of geographically
and historically specific waters, the Atlantic of the Middle Passage. Their brown
bodies are gender fluid not because they choose parodic proliferations but because
they have been "washed of all this lading, bag and baggage" by a social liquida-
tion that is not the willful or playful fluidity of Butler's drag queens and Sedg-
wick's butch bottoms. I am compelled by Butler's growing insistence, from the
1999 preface to Gender Trouble to the engaging Undoing Gender, that gender
theory should address more material concerns — issues of survival for the trans-
gendered and others whose "unintelligible" bodies threaten their very lives.*^ But
Brand's embodied images of the black queer Atlantic remind us that such survival
is not a concern that can be reduced to the present, that black gender queers are
always already surviving a past of multiple, intersecting violences. The specificity
of these waters, these images, this literary language is at once a map to the door of
no return and a map to a black queer alternative to canonical gender theory.

Yet the route of un-Return is not only one of violence; it is also one of queer
erotics. Just before the ruttier for the marooned. Brand includes another kind of
ruttier titled "Arriving at Desire." But just as Brand's ruttier for the marooned
never goes in expected directions, the desire she charts here never becomes sex-
ual or even interpersonal. After a description of childhood reading experiences

2W GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

that introduced her to desires both pohtical and erotic, the narrator recounts how
she came to write her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon. Like Butler on
Rehoboth Beach, Brand conceived her text at a crossing-over between land and
water, between experience of the real and vision of the (im)possible. Her inspi-
ration came while contemplating maritime artifacts in a Port of Spain museum
overlooking the sea, and her converging descriptions of the museum's inside and
outside become the Map's, most erotic description:

As you crest the hill, there is the ocean, the Atlantic, and there a fresh
wide breeze relieving the deep flush of heat. From atop this hill you can
see over the whole town. Huge black cannons overlook the ocean, the har-
bour, and the town's perimeter. If you look right, if your eyes could round
the point, you would see the Atlantic and the Caribbean in a wet blue
embrace. If you come here at night you will surprise lovers, naked or cloth-
ing askew, groping hurriedly or dangerously languorous, draped against
the black gleaming cannons of George III.*''

Before we ever come to these lovers. Brand at once gestures toward and leaves
opaque two queer desires: the Atlantic's desire for the Caribbean it meets in a wet
blue embrace, and the narrator's desire for the ocean she describes so erotically.
This desire is queerly gendered, since ocean, sea, and Brand — rolling and writ-
ing in opposition to the black cannons — would all normatively be feminized. It is
also queer in a black Atlantic way, since it ascribes feeling to bodies — of water
and of African females — that, in colonizers' and slave traders' maps of the world,
were never supposed to feel. The queerness of this sensuality is the drive Brand
describes two paragraphs earlier: the diasporic search to "put the senses back
together again," a sensual re-membering that George Ill's cannons, the policing of
sea and of diasporic bodies, cannot stop.*^

What puts together Atlantic and Caribbean, viewers and lovers in this pas-
sage is another list, a string of conditionals: "If you look ... if your eyes could
round . . . you would see. ... If you come . . . you will surprise." Like the ruttier^s
litany of negatives, this conjunction of if . . . would, if ■ ■ ■ will traces some com-
plexities of the black queer time the Map moves through. The embrace of Atlantic
and Caribbean, of lovers in front of cannons, is not written as a present reality
that narrator or readers can see but as past and future possibilities they could
see if and when their consciousness and body move creatively to "find one's way
at sea," to arrive at a desire — for sentient pasts, livable futures — to which there
are no ready maps. This desire promises to emerge at a site of oceanographic and

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211

historical uncertainty and violence that the reader's eyes cannot quite reach ("if
your eyes could round the point" you would see it, but can they?): the harbor where
Atlantic meets Caribbean, where ships docked after a Middle Passage that did
not end. Neither Atlantic nor Caribbean yet both, this unseen site is one where
diaspora's radical blurring can also harbor new routes to being, routes neither
shielded nor boxed in by doors of hegemonic space, time, and identity. It is the
space for rewiring the senses that Alexander calls for, a crossroads/crosscurrents
of "expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by the
limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of
the body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum."*'

One of Butler's important observations in Gender Trouble is that all sub-
jects put together fictionally solid subjectivities from fluid, unstable experiences,
and Brand's Map supports this idea. Earlier in the text she observes, "There are
ways of constructing the world — that is, of putting it together each morning, what
it should look like piece by piece. . . . Before that everything is liquid, ubiquitous
and mute. We accumulate information over our lives which bring various things
into solidity, into view."-'" What proves innovative in Brand's black queer Atlan-
tic liquidity is how insistently she weaves these explorations of figurative fluidity
together with poignant material engagements with the waters that shape raced,
nationalized, classed, gendered, and sexualized selves in different moments and
sites of diaspora. Understanding the particularity of the liquids that we put together
daily is the project of A Map to the Door of No Return , a project that allows the
marooned of the diaspora another kind of queer coupling: the possibility of putting
the world together and putting the senses back together at the same time. As Wek-
ker writes of her search for stories of women's sexuality in the African diaspora,
finding these stories involves collecting the curving, chipped, conch shell — like
"pieces of [black women's] conceptions of being human" that have been dispersed
in the waters of forced transatlantic migrations and that individuals and commu-
nities rearrange in creatively transculturated ways.-^i The key to making black
queer sense of such self-pieces is not turning to race-, class-, or geographically
unmarked models of sexuality and humanity — based in the European Enlighten-
ment philosophy that justified slavery in the first place — but tracing as carefully
as possible the particular, specific, always marked contours, the contested beach-
scapes of African diaspora histories of gender and sexuality. So in the black queer
time and place of the door of no return, fluid desire is neither purely metaphor
nor purely luxury. Instead — like the blue embrace of two bodies of water — its
connections and crosscurrents look to speak through and beyond the washed lad-

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ing, the multiply effaced identities of the Middle Passage. Finally, Brand's ruttiers
chart how the marooned come to sail as maroons, continually stealing back the
space where they live.

this is my ocean, but it is speaking

another language, since its accent changes around

different islands

— Derek Walcott, Midsummer

The ocean does speak many languages, and I am only a novice linguist. So I have
tried to present academic writing that is fluid, that in some way explores what it
would mean to perform the oceanness that it thematizes. I have tried to broach
more whispered secrets than I could draw out and raise more questions than can
be answered, to pick apart metaphors, put them together without closure. At this
point, then, I do not want to conclude or pretend to. Instead, I want to end with
thoughts on some of the challenges that the Atlantic offers the border waters of
African diaspora, queer, and queer African diaspora studies.

The long-navigated Atlantic tells us that, like Brand's resurrection of the
marooned, queer Africana studies must explore what it means to conceive our field
historically and materially. Like Lara and Brand, as we navigate the postmodern
we must look for the fissures that show how the anti- and ante-modern continue to
configure black queer broken-and-wholeness. At the same time, the meaningfully
multiblued Atlantic tells us that we must continue to navigate our field metaphori-
cally. As Frantz Fanon contended in The Wretched of the Earth, metaphors provide
conceptual bridges between the lived and the possible that use language queerly
to map other roads of becoming. My point is never that we should strip theory of
watery metaphors but that we should return to the materiality of water to make
its metaphors mean more complexly, shaking off settling into frozen figures. The
territory-less Atlantic also tells us that, like the song between Micaela and la Mar,
black queer studies must speak transnationally. When black becomes only Afri-
can American, black queer theory becomes insular; as the crosscurrents between
Atlantic and Caribbean, Atlantic and Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean
are richest in marine life, so they will be richest in depth of theorizing. -^2 Most
simply, our challenge is to be like the ocean: spreading outward, running through
bays and fingers, while remaining heavy, stinging, a force against our hands.

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213

Notes

1. Kale Fajardo, "Filipino Cross Currents: Histories of Filipino Seafaring — Asia and
the Americas" (address, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, February 14, 2005).

2. See Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 4—10.

3. "Slavery in New York," New-York Historical Society, October 7, 2005 -March 26,
2006.

4. See Fajardo's forthcoming manuscript, "Filipino Cross Currents: Oceanographies of
Seafaring and Masculinities in the Global Economy."

5. On the importance of reimagining what constitutes an archive in queer studies, see
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University
Press, 2005), 169 - 74.

6. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Poli-
tics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 290.

7. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 292.

8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993),
17.

9. Antonio Benftez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Per-
spective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 2.

10. Benftez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 16.

11. Gihoy, Black Atlantic, 83.

12. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 201.

13. Bemtez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 5.

14. Benftez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 29.

15. A number of recent studies have reworked the concept and space of the black Atlantic
to take class and materiality into serious consideration. These include the creative,
groundbreaking work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed
Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001) and
Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy
of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). These imaginative material-
ist revisions, however — particularly the insistent heterosexualizing of romance (even
among pirates!) in The Many-Headed Hydra — still continue some of the unqueered
sexual politics of their predecessors.

16. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equian o, in The
Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1987), 32.

17. Quoted in Charles Johnson and Patricia Smith, Africans in America: America's Jour-
ney through Slavery (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 72.

18. Ana-Maurine Lara, Erzulie's Skirt (Washington, DC: Red Bone, 2006), 173.

19. Sally Price and Richard Price, Two Evenings in Saramaka (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 3, 396, 207.

214

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

20. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, vol.
2 (1794; rpt. New York: AMS, 1966), 94. See also Mederic Moreau de Saint-Mery,
Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie fran-
gaise de I'isle Saint Domingue, 3 vols., ed. Blanche Maurel and Etienne Taillemite
(1797; rpt. Paris: Societe de Fhistoire des colonies frangaises, 1958), 1:77.

21. Gloria Wekker, Ik ben een gouden munt (Amsterdam: Feministische Uitgeverij VITA,
1994), 145, translation mine. The original Dutch reads: "In verschillende delen van
de Diaspora de relatie tussen mensen die op hetzelfde ship naar de 'Nieuwe' Wereld
overgekomen waren, een bijzondere bleef. Het Braziliaanse 'malungo,' het Trinidadi-
aanse 'malongue,' het Haitiaanse 'batiment' an het Surinaamse 'sippi' en 'mati' zijn
allemaal voorbeelden van die speciale, niet-biologische, symbolische band tussen
twee mensen van dezelfde sekse."

22. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Double-
day Canada, 2001), 61.

23. These details of Dominican migration to Puerto Rico have been reported widely in
the press. For a sampling of such reportage, see the Puerto Rico Herald^s collection of
articles at puertorico-herald.org/issues/2004/vol8n07/DesperlslHop.html (accessed
February 8, 2008).

24. Ana Lara, unpublished interview by Naomi Wood, October 2006.

25. Lara, Erzulie's Skirt, 233.

26. Lara, Erzulie's Skirt, 159—60. 1 choose not to translate the poem into English to main-
tain the opacity of the Spanish in the original. An indirect translation is contained in
the following paragraph, as 1 discuss.

27. Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2005), 309.

28. Rinaldo Walcott, "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the
Diaspora," in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and
Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 93.

29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), 176.

30. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.

31. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.

32. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8—9.

33. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.

34. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi— xvii.

35. See Rehoboth's official promotional Web site, www.rehoboth.com/beaches.asp.

36. See Alexs Pate, West ofRehohoth (New York: William Morrow, 2001).

37. See Michelle Cliff with Judith Raiskin, "The Art of History: An Interview with
Michelle Cliff," Kenyan Review 15 (Winter 1993): 69. While there are many other
texts that undertake representations of female same-sex eroticism in the Caribbean
before Brand's, including the work of Eliot Bliss, Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capecia,
Michele Lacrosil, Nadine Magloire, and Astrid Roemer, No Language Is Neutral does
become a "breakout" queer text in the anglophone Caribbean.

BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC

215

38. Maya Mavjee, "Opening the Door: An Interview with Dionne Brand," Read Magazine,
March 28, 2003, www.randomhouse.ca/readmag/page28.htm.

39. Dionne Brand, personal communication, Toronto, October 20, 2006, after hearing a
paper in which I presented this reading of A Map to the Door of No Return.

40. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 19.

41. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 20.

42. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 43.

43. See Chela Sandoval, Methodologies of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2000); Butler, Gender Trouble, xxvii.

44. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 212.

45. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 213.

46. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).

47. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 197.

48. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 195.

49. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 288.

50. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 141.

51. See Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-
Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 215.

52. I am inspired here by Rachel Carson's classic The Sea around Us, which explains:
"Wherever two currents meet . . . there are zones of turbulence and unrest. ... At
such places the richness and abundance of marine life reveals itself most strikingly"
{The Sea around Us [New York: Mentor, 1950], 50).